Oana Balalau

About Me

I am a starting researcher at Inria Saclay in the CEDAR team and part-time assistant professor at École polytechnique. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Informatics in the team of Gerhard Weikum. I received my Ph.D. from Télécom Paris University and my advisor was Mauro Sozio.

My research interests lie in the area of data mining, with a focus on graph mining and computational social science.

Originally I am from Romania and more exactly Rucăr, a village in the Carpathian Mountains.

Publications

SubRank: Subgraph Embeddings via a Subgraph Proximity Measure
to appear in PAKDD 2020, O. Balalau and S. Goyal

PRINCE: Provider-side Interpretability with Counterfactual Explanations in Recommender Systems
WSDM 2020, A. Ghazimatin, O. Balalau, R. Saha Roy, and G. Weikum
[pdf] [code]

Discovering the Functions of Language in Online Forums
EMNLP W-NUT 2019, Y. Ismaeil, O. Balalau, and P. Mirza
[pdf] [dataset]

Analyzing the Traits and Anomalies of Political Discussions on Reddit
ICWSM 2019, A. Guimareas, O. Balalau, E. Terolli, and G. Weikum
[pdf]

EviDense: a Graph-based Method for Finding Unique High-impact Events with Succinct Keyword-based Descriptions
ICWSM 2018, O. Balalau, C. Castillo and M. Sozio
[short] [long] [code]

Listing k-cliques in Sparse Real-World Graphs
WWW 2018, M. Danisch, O. Balalau and M. Sozio.
[pdf] [code]

Finding Heaviest k-Subgraphs and Events in Social Media
ICDM DaMNet 2016, M. Letsios, O. Balalau, M. Danisch, E. Orsini and M. Sozio
[pdf] [code]

Finding Subgraphs with Maximum Total Density and Limited Overlap
WSDM 2015, O. Balalau, F. Bonchi, T-H. Hubert Chan, F. Gullo and M. Sozio
[pdf] [code]

Selected talks

EviDense: a Graph-based Method for Finding Unique High-impact Events with Succinct Keyword-based Descriptions
3rd International Workshop on Event Analytics using Social Media Data, in conjunction with ICWSM-18
Stanford, USA
June 25, 2018

On Finding Dense Subgraphs and Events in Social Media.
Workshop on Graph Learning, Laboratory of Information, Networking and Communication Sciences (LINCS)
Paris, France
May 14, 2018

Densest subgraph computation and applications in finding events on social media.
Complex Networks LIP6, Paris, France
November 27, 2015

Event detection in social media via graph mining techniques.
Journée de la Chaire Big Data & Market Insights (Télécom ParisTech), Paris, France
October 2, 2015

Recherche de sous-graphes à densité totale maximale et chevauchement limité.
BDA 2015, Île de Porquerolles, France
October 1, 2015

Article similarity in Wikipedia.
EDBT Summer School 2015, Palamos, Spain
September 4, 2015

Finding Subgraphs with Maximum Total Density and Limited Overlap.
WSDM 2015, Shanghai, China
February 5, 2015

Professional Service

External reviewer: WWW 2015, WWW 2016, COMPLEX NETWORKS 2016, WWW 2017, ICWSM2017, KDD 2017, WSDM 2018
Reviewer: TKDE, SNAM

Teaching

I really enjoy teaching.
I supervised classes on the frameworks Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark. You can find here a short introduction to Apache Hadoop.

Miscellaneous

In my free time I enjoy reading, cycling and learning to play the guitar.
My sister writes very nice stories and travel impressions (in Romanian).